Electrophysiology (EP) catheters are used in a variety of diagnostic, therapeutic, and/or mapping and ablative procedures to diagnose and/or correct conditions such as atrial or ventricular arrhythmias, including for example, ectopic atrial tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, and atrial flutter. Arrhythmias can create a variety of conditions including irregular heart rates, loss of synchronous atrioventricular contractions and stasis of blood flow in a chamber of a heart which can lead to a variety of symptomatic and asymptomatic ailments and even death.
Typically, a catheter is deployed and manipulated through a patient's vasculature to the intended site, for example, a site within a patient's heart. The catheter carries one or more electrodes that can be used for cardiac mapping or diagnosis, ablation and/or other therapy delivery modes, or both, for example. Once at the intended site, treatment can include, for example, radio frequency (RF) ablation, cryoablation, laser ablation, chemical ablation, high-intensity focused ultrasound-based ablation, microwave ablation, and/or other ablation treatments. The catheter imparts ablative energy to cardiac tissue to create one or more lesions in the cardiac tissue. To position a catheter at a desired site within the body, some type of navigation may be used, such as using mechanical steering features incorporated into the catheter (or a sheath). In some examples, medical personnel may manually manipulate and/or operate the catheter using the mechanical steering features.
Various catheter designs, such as for example, spline-based catheters with an array of electrodes, can be used to perform voltage mapping relative to the cardiac system as noted above. Voltage mapping is an important clinical tool to evaluate arrhythmogenic myocardium and guides further diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. It is most often conducted using bipoles; however, the challenges of directional dependence and electrode spacing irregularity when using bipole-based signals can result in suboptimal data collection and erroneous signal processing.
In part, the present disclosure addresses these challenges and others, in part, by extending omnipolar-based systems and methods for use with voltage mapping and other tissue sensing related systems and methods as recited herein.